When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? (1979)

          While the prospect of a Marjoe Gortner vanity project may not sound enticing, seeing as how the preacher-turned-actor spent most of the ’70s appearing in rotten B-movies, Gortner’s participation as leading man and producer of When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? is deceptive. He’s all over the flick, playing a showy part and spewing crazed monologues, but he’s better here than usual, striving for and almost achieving charming-devil lyricism. More importantly, he shares the screen gracefully. Nonetheless, When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? is an odd movie. Adapted by Mark Medoff from his own award-winning play, it’s part character study, part social commentary, and part hostage-crisis thriller. The disparate elements clash with each other, sometimes creating narrative whiplash, and Englishman Peter Firth is wildly miscast in role patterned after the Marlon Brando/James Dean style of rural American greasers. When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? ultimately rewards attention—thanks to an abundance of action, occasional shots of pathos, and some strong acting moments—but it’s neither credible nor satisfying.

          Most of the picture takes place at a tiny diner in New Mexico, where several characters converge on a fateful day. Angel (Stephanie Faracy) is the simple-minded waitress, and Stephen “Red” Ryder (Firth) is the angst-ridden night cook. Traveling through town are classical musician Clarisse Ethridge (Lee Grant) and her manager/husband, Richard (Hal Linden). And then there’s Vietnam vet-turned-drug dealer Teddy (Gortner) and his hippie-chick girlfriend, Cheryl (Candy Clark). Desperate for cash and drunk on exerting power over people simply because he has a gun, Teddy takes everyone in the diner hostage and forces them to do humiliating things (e.g., making out with each other, etc.). Drama stems from character revelations that occur under pressure, as well as the question of how much crap the hostages can endure before fighting back. Because the story is set in 1968, there’s also a trope of counterculture-vs.-Establishment friction, which never quite clicks.

          Particularly when the story veers into full-on action/suspense terrain, it’s difficult to parse what sort of a statement Madoff wants to make. In lieu of thematic clarity, viewers get spectacle, mostly in the form of Gortner holding forth. While he doesn’t embarrass himself, a dramatic powerhouse he is not, so the film’s wings carry it only so high. Of the supporting players, Faracy makes the strongest impression, hitting her notes just right, even though she spends most of her screen time with Firth, whose performance is distractingly false—he seems as if he’s reading each line for the first time and struggling to replicate American idioms. 

When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?: FUNKY

The Big Sleep (1978)

          Three years after playing Raymond Chandler’s famous detective Phillip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely (1975), which was set in the 1940s, Robert Mitchum reprised the role in this film, which is set in the 1970s. Making the time-shift between movies even more awkward, The Big Sleep writer-director Michael Winner employs hokey devices straight out of Chandler’s Depression-era fiction, such as femme-fatale types and hardboiled interior monologue presented as voiceover. Yet in other respects, The Big Sleep is quite modern, thanks to ample amounts of gore and nudity. Therefore, it’s an old-fashioned movie filled with things that turn off most fans of old-fashioned movies.

          Moreover, Winner risked walking on hallowed cinematic ground with this project, since the first movie version of The Big Sleep—starring Humphrey Bogart and released in 1946—is considered a classic of the original film-noir cycle. Given this tricky context, it almost doesn’t even matter that Winner’s version of The Big Sleep is an adequate little mystery/thriller. In order to satisfy all concerned parties, the movie needed to be superlative, which it is not. Furthermore, Winner inexplicably changed the location from Los Angeles (as in the original Chandler novel) to London, and then populated the cast with a random mixture of Brits and Yanks. Since nothing inherently English happens, the jump across the pond is a head-scratcher from a conceptual standpoint.

          In any event, the convoluted story begins when Marlowe is invited to the home of a rich American, retired General Sternwood (James Stewart). Sternwood hires Marlowe to scare off a would-be blackmailer. Meanwhile, Marlowe receives seductive advances from Sternwood’s adult daughters, the cynical Charlotte (Sarah Miles) and the provocative Camilla (Candy Clark). As per the Chandler story, the seemingly simple job opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, eventually placing Marlowe in the midst of betrayals, double-crosses, and murders.

           Winner hits the sleazy elements of the narrative hard, as in scenes of Camilla posing nude for a pornographer and various incidents of people getting shot through the skull. The material is so grim and the story is so bewildering that The Big Sleep isn’t fun to watch, per se, even though it boasts abundant sex appeal thanks to Clark, Miles, and costars Joan Collins and Diana Quick. Concurrently, the men in the supporting cast provide gradations of menace, with Colin Blakely, Richard Boone, Edward Fox, and Oliver Reed playing villainous types. (Offering glimmers of gallantry are the characters portrayed by Harry Andrews and John Mills.) However, none of the film’s performances or technical contributions is extraordinary, so Mitchum dominates in the absence of anything more interesting. As in Farewell, My Lovely, Mitchum’s seen-it-all demeanor suits the Marlowe character perfectly.

The Big Sleep: FUNKY

Fat City (1972)

          No genre epitomizes the anything-goes spirit of the best American ’70s movies more than the downbeat character study, because during the ’70s, actors resembling real people were given opportunities to play characters resembling real people. Nothing could be further from traditional Hollywood glamour, for instance, than Fat City, the exceptional drama that revived director John Huston’s career. An ensemble piece set in the agricultural fields and skid-row neighborhoods in and around Stockton, California, Fat City is filled with dreamers, drunks, and losers. It’s a hymn to the hopeless. Whereas Huston had in the immediately preceding years lost his way by making bloated and/or misguided projects including The Bible: In the Beginning (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), the director used Fat City to return to his core strength of poetic narratives about people living on the fringes of society.

          Although he didn’t write the piece (Leonard Gardner adapted the script from his own novel), Fat City concerns themes that were deeply familiar to Huston, including alienation, boxing, drinking, and failure. So even if one doesn’t get the sense of the director seeing himself in the film’s characters, one intuits that he’s known the type of people whose sad exploits he puts onscreen. Working with a skillful crew including master cinematographer Conrad Hall, Huston generates utterly believable atmosphere, with every dirty location and every tattered piece of costuming accentuating the theme of people whose lives comprise hard-won dignity against a backdrop of desperation.

          Stacy Keach stars as Billy Tully, a washed-up boxer who decides to get himself together by going to a gym, where he meets promising young fighter Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges). Emboldened by the idea of mentoring a beginner while restarting his own career, Billy initiates a pathetic quasi-romance with a drunk named Oma (Susan Tyrrell). As the story progresses, Billy waffles between his real life, which involves arduous work picking fruit for meager pay, and his imagined life, which involves optimistic notions about a future with a surrogate family including Ernie and Oma. Fat City is primarily concerned with the ways in which people who have nothing latch onto possibilities. Similarly to how Billy entertains foolish notions of being a better fighter in middle age than he ever was as a youth, Ernie buys into Billy’s encouragement, and Oma pretends that what she has with Billy is genuine—even though she’s already involved with another man. Yet Gardner’s story doesn’t oversimplify these desolate characters by focusing myopically on their inability to improve their situations; quite to the contrary, Gardner illustrates every self-destructive tendency of these characters, such as Billy’s habit of blaming his circumstances on bad management. Every person in Fat City seems achingly real.

          Huston cast the picture beautifully, getting letter-perfect work out of nearly everyone in the film. Keach’s unique combination of a bruiser’s physicality and a romantic’s soul transforms the actor into Billy; within his first few scenes, Keach erases any audience knowledge of his aptitude for classical dialogue, creating the complete illusion of a broken-down slob living on the streets of Stockton. Tyrrell gives an equally powerful performance (for which she earned an Oscar nomination), her raspy voice and wild eyes conveying a woman lost to alcohol but not robbed of her humanity, while Bridges and costar Candy Clark provide youthful counterpoints to the main characters. (It’s not hard to imagine the people played by Bridges and Clark becoming like Billy and Oma later in life.) As for Huston, his artistic rejuvenation continued—although he made a few turkeys in the years after Fat City, he also made some of his most interesting pictures, including the challenging chamber pieces Wise Blood (1979), Under the Volcano (1984), and The Dead (1987), all of which are thematic cousins to Fat City.

Fat City: RIGHT ON

Citizens Band (1977)

          While not a particularly interesting movie, the offbeat comedy Citizens Band represents the convergence of two interesting careers. For director Jonathan Demme, the movie was a breakthrough studio job after making three low-budget exploitation flicks for producer Roger Corman. For second-time screenwriter Paul Brickman, the movie provided a transition between working on existing material (Brickman debuted with the script for 1977’s The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training) and creating brand-new characters; Brickman later blossomed as the writer/director of the extraordinary Risky Business (1983). A further point of interest is that while Citizens Band tangentially belongs to the mid-’70s vogue for trucker movies, it’s much more concerned with the possibilities of a communication format to bridge distances between people. In other words, this is an earnest project from serious people, so it can’t be discounted. Nonetheless, watching all 98 minutes of the loosely plotted and sluggishly paced feature requires abundant patience.

          Since Citizens Band never even remotely approaches outright hilarity, the charms of the picture are found in small character moments and—one of Demme’s specialties—scenes that celebrate human compassion and understanding. One wonders, however, whether a shambling assortment of kind-hearted vignettes was what Brickman had in mind, since certain sequences feel as if they were conceived to become full-on comedy setpieces. While Demme’s preference for intimacy over spectacle gives Citizens Band an amiable sense of reality, this directorial approach results in a decidedly low-energy cinematic experience.

          Anyway, in lieu of a proper storyline, the movie has a number of interconnected subplots. The main character, if only by default since he has the largest number of scenes, is Spider (Paul LeMat), a small-town CB-radio operator who watches out for truckers and vainly tries to keep emergency frequencies free of outside chatter. Spider lives with his ornery father (Roberts Blossom), a former trucker, and Spider’s part of a love triangle involving his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Electra (Candy Clark), and Spider’s brother, Blood (Bruce McGill). The Spider scenes are quite sleepy except when he plays vigilante by destroying radio equipment belonging to rule-breaking CB operators. Another thread of the movie involves a long-haul trucker nicknamed “Chrome Angel” (Charles Napier), who is revealed as a secret bigamist; the first meeting of his two wives plays out with unexpected warmth. There’s also some material involving various eccentric radio enthusiasts, such as Hot Coffee (Alix Elias), a plain-Jane hooker catering to truckers. The movie toggles back and forth between various characters, presenting one inconsequential scene after another. (Don’t be fooled by the exciting opening sequence of a truck derailment; thrills are in short supply thereafter.)

          Citizens Band has a slick look, thanks to inventive cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, though it’s questionable whether his moody style actually suits the material. Yet the presence of artful lighting is just one more random point in Citizens Band’s favor. The movie’s a collection of many things, some of which merit attention; the problem is that these things never coalesce into a worthwhile whole.

Citizens Band: FUNKY

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

          The Man Who Fell to Earth is arguably the climax of the downbeat sci-fi cycle that began with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), because a year after The Man Who Fell to Earth was released, George Lucas’ Star Wars steered the sci-fi genre back toward lighthearted escapism. Every frame of The Man Who Fell to Earth is depressing and weird, and the film presents a brutally nihilistic statement about the depravity of mankind: Over the course of the picture, an alien filled with noble purpose gets sidetracked by the earthly pleasures of alcohol, sex, and television, eventually becoming a desiccated shell of his former self and the cause of his home planet’s likely ruination. Nicholas Roeg, the cinematographer-turned-filmmaker who spent the first decade of his directorial career exploring bizarre intersections between alienation and carnal desire, takes The Man Who Fell to Earth into some very strange places via surrealistic images and sounds. Furthermore, singer David Bowie, who was cast in the leading role at the apex of his androgynous rock-god reign, delivers a performance so detached that he really does seem like a visitor from another planet.
          Working with screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, Roeg adapted this picture from a 1963 novel by Walter Tevis, best known for telling the story of fictional pool player “Fast” Eddie Felson in his novels The Hustler (1959) and The Color of Money (1984)—go figure. The story concerns one Thomas Jerome Newton (Bowie), an alien who travels to Earth because his own planet is suffering a drought. With an eye toward buying materials for a spaceship that can transport water back to his world, Thomas uses his space-age knowledge to create inventions that make him super-wealthy. However, he gets distracted when he meets a small-town hotel employee named Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), and they embark on a romantic relationship. Soon, Thomas becomes mired in drinking and screwing, so he doesn’t notice that one of his underlings, Dr. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), has discovered Thomas’ true identity. Nathan tells the government about Thomas just before Thomas tries to launch his spaceship, so government agents nab Thomas and secure him in a prison cell for experimentation and interrogation. That’s when the story gets really twisted, but the bummer events in the second half of the picture shouldn’t be spoiled.

          Aside from the inherently odd story and Bowie’s ethereal acting (the singer has acknowledged he was coked out of his mind during the whole production), what makes The Man Who Fell to Earth so peculiar is Roeg’s avoidance of conventional storytelling tools. Roeg obscures time relationships between scenes, so we experience the movie in as much of a blur as the characters; additionally, Roeg leaves several major story points unexplained. In fact, the very texture of the picture adds to this disorienting effect. Roeg uses heavy filters and other forms of visual distortion to heighten the strangeness of scenes, and jumpy editing creates an odd rhythm in which, say, a straightforward dialogue exchange might be juxtaposed with a phantasmagoric montage. Roeg also fills the screen with nudity and raw sex scenes, frequently jolting viewers into did-I-just-see-that reactions. Whether all of this gimmickry accentuates the story’s themes—or whether it’s all just impossibly pretentious—is a call for each individual viewer to make. What’s not open to debate is that The Man Who Fell to Earth is unlike any other sci-fi picture of the same era.

The Man Who Fell to Earth: FREAKY

American Graffiti (1973) & More American Graffiti (1979)

          The most relatable picture in his entire filmography, American Graffiti offers an engaging riff on a formative period in George Lucas’ life, when being a kid on the verge of adulthood meant cruising for chicks in a great car on a cool California evening. The fact that Lucas once conceived and directed a story this full of believable characters makes it frustrating that so many of his latter-day projects lack recognizable humanity; it seems that once he departed for a galaxy far, far away, he never returned. Yet that frustration somehow deepens the resonance of American Graffiti, because just as the story captures a fleeting moment in the lives of its characters, the movie captures a fleeting moment in the life of its creator. Utilizing an innovative editing style in which brisk vignettes are interwoven to the accompaniment of a dense soundtrack comprising familiar vintage pop tunes, Lucas confounded his Universal Studios financiers but thrilled early-’70s moviegoers by conjuring the cinematic equivalent of switching the dial on a car radio. As soon as any given scene makes its statement, Lucas jumps to the next high point, repeating the adrenalized cycle until it’s time to call it a night.

          Set in Lucas’ hometown of Modesto circa 1962, American Graffiti follows the adventures of four recent high school graduates trying to figure out the next steps in their lives. They interact with a constellation of friends and strangers during a hectic night of romance, sex, vandalism, and vehicular excess. Some of the characters and relationships have more impact than others, but the various threads mesh comfortably and amplify each other. For instance, the melodramatic saga of Steve (Ron Howard) and his girlfriend Laurie (Cindy Williams) resonates with the obsessive quest by Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) to find a mysterious dreamgirl (Suzanne Somers). Moody greaser John (Paul Le Mat) and tough-guy drag racer Bob (Harrison Ford) add danger, while precocious Carol (Mackenzie Phillips) and hapless Terry (Charles Martin Smith) add humor. With wall-to-wall tunes expressing the characters’ raging hormones, Lucas weaves a quilt of adolescent angst and teen longing that simultaneously debunks and romanticizes the historical moment immediately preceding John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It’s a testament to Lucas’ craft that audiences fell in love with the exuberant surface of the movie despite the gloom bubbling underneath. The picture’s success did remarkable things for nearly everyone involved, helping Howard land the lead in the blockbuster sitcom Happy Days (1974–1984) and giving Lucas the box-office mojo to make Star Wars (1977).

          More American Graffiti is a very different type of film. Written and directed by Bill L. Norton under Lucas’ supervision, the picture explores what happened to several characters after the events of the first film. Howard, Le Mat, Smith, and Williams reprise their roles, and Ford makes a brief appearance. (Dreyfuss is notably absent.) A dark, experimental, and provocative examination of the tumultuous years spanning 1964 to 1967, More American Graffiti would have been nervy as a stand-alone film, so it’s outright ballsy as a major-studio sequel to a crowd-pleaser. Norton follows three storylines, giving each a distinctive look. Scenes with Howard and Williams are shot conventionally, accentuating the everyday misery of a couple drifting apart. Scenes with Smith’s character in Vietnam are shot on grainy 16mm with a boxy aspect ratio (even though the rest of the picture is widescreen). Trippiest of all are scenes with Candy Clark (whose character in the first picture was relatively minor); set in hippy-dippy San Francisco, these sequences use wild split-screen techniques. LeMat’s character appears in an extended flashback to which Norton frequently returns, like the chorus of a pop song. Tackling antiwar protests, draft dodgers, drug culture, women’s liberation, and other topics, the film is a too-deliberate survey of ’60s signifiers. That said, More American Graffiti has integrity to spare, bringing the shadows that hid beneath the first movie’s shiny surface to the foreground.

American Graffiti: RIGHT ON

More American Graffiti: FUNKY